Author: Daisy Valera

The event was also called “Casa Tomada” (Occupied house), because for nearly a week all corners of the Casa de las Americas cultural institution were given over to conferences and expositions of artists from nearly all branches of the arts.

Bread is a recurrent theme in Cuba -as I imagine it is in the rest of the world- since the price of this product is used as a measuring stick for estimating other food costs. On our island, bread has been controversial in many senses: the quantity, the quality and its size.

One of the most impressive events organized every year in Havana is the Festival of New Latin American Cinema (aka-Havana Film Festival) – and this year was no different. To walk Havana’s streets during the Festival is quite different from the rest of the year. Instead of tired faces, I saw excited ones. It was as if most people had rid themselves of the complexities of daily life.

Every day Havana gets a little older. Yet when I saw how this anniversary was highlighted in the newspaper, I couldn’t avoid a sense of repulsion.

ELAM is a large school where students from many countries converge; therefore it’s a place where the various cultures of Latin America come into contact and begin to understand one another, an undoubtedly challenging situation.

My first encounter with Jose Alejandro was on second page of the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde (JR). It was when a section of letters from the readers called “Acuse de Recibo” (Acknowledgement of Receipt) first began. His section captured my full attention because it pointed out people’s problems and sought solutions – something not very common in the Cuban press.

Bureaucracy, dogmatism, capitalist penetration, the lack of freedom of speech, ever increasing differentiation between classes, opportunism, the disastrous policy in which some command and others obey, and false proletarian internationalism were the ruinous contributions that Stalinism made to the revolution in the USSR.

“Another one’s gone nuts” was how an e-mail began that was sent to a friend of mine a few days ago. With such an inflammatory heading, those of us who received the forwarded letter read in it anticipation, anxious to find out who this crazy person was.

“The pig meat tragedy,” that’s what I ended up calling what happened to me at the Tulipan Market, which is characterized by its wide assortment of fruits and vegetables at prices a little lower than those in non-state-run markets.

A couple weeks ago, a news item appeared in the press that may have been of interest to a considerable number of Cubans. The headline in the October 9 edition of the Granma newspaper announced, “Chavez Receives New Advance Team of Cuban Doctors.”